Many major news and magazine publishers like the New York Times, Buzzfeed, NBC News, and NatGeo plan to post articles directly to Facebook starting Wednesday, May 13. This major change, for both the publishers and the social media giant, begins with the New York Times, which will start publishing select articles on the aforementioned date.

Like Us on Facebook

These published stories will be appearing on people's news feed. Of course, this new Facebook feature presents optimum convenience for readers who do not have to constantly change tabs to shift between reading news and sharing it with their friends. This makes sensewhen one takes into consideration the fact that Facebook has recently surpassed Google as the leading driver of referral traffic to news sites.

Theoretically, this should also help dramatically expand readership for the articles posted on the social media site. Facebook garners more than 1.4 billion users worldwide each month, so it is no surprise why news giants like the NY Times would partner up with it for better traffic and readership support.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is sweetening the deal even more by offering to let publishers keep 100% of the money from ads they sell against an article or 70% when Facebook gets to sell the ad.

John Steinberg, chief executive of the DailyMail.com in North America, has this to say about the matter: "I think most people would view 70% as being better than zero, [...] We would love to be on Facebook if we are invited."

Moreover, Playbuzz founder Shaul Olmert also told the Wall Street Journal that "[Facebook is] not only the largest source of traffic for pretty much all Web publishers, but [is] now almost the exclusively important one, [...] While we rely so heavily on them, they don't owe us anything."

TagsNew York Times, Direct to Facebook Articles, BuzzFeed, natgeo